“This is very beautiful and deeply sensitive writing. With characters affected by nameless forces, the text reads as fable and allegory, and at times evokes the nightmarish sense one gets from reading Kafka. Other sections have something of the quality, in written form, of Shaun Tan’s masterly graphic novel, The Arrival.”

Author Arnold Zable (award-winning author of Jewels and Ashes, Café Scheherazade, The Fig Tree and Sea of Many Returns)

* Shadows and Wings was shortlisted, from 500+ submitted manuscripts, for the Australian CAL Scribe Fiction Prize.

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Shadows & Wings

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* Download the first 40 pages - Shadows and Wings: A Fugue - PDF

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Why should I help this novel get published?

"Self-publishing is about power, about taking the responsibility to disseminate your words yourself, instead of depending on being selected and approved … by a publisher who might be more interested in your marketability than your message." 

Muller, Lauren (ed), June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. NY: Routledge. (1995) 

The majority of publishers are now in the hands of huge, 1% corporations. HarperCollins belongs to Rupert Murdoch. Bertelsmann owns Random House. With the corporatization of the book world have come savage changes to the publishing landscape. New authors are kept to a minimum, safe names and tabloid themes get precedence. After all, the decisions that were once the exclusive domain of editors, are now in the hands of the Men in Suits, flanked by the armed guard of marketing departments. Profit margins that were 4% are now 15%, the same as they are for merchandise and DVDs – unreachable for much literary fiction. Books that don't achieve their bottom line mandates in 6 months are shelved, as the publisher owns the printing rights. A book that might need a year or more to quietly find its readership simply shrivels and is gone ... never to be re-printed. 

As a long-time advocate and practitioner of independent arts, I have made the decision, with the kind understanding of my agent, to publish my novel. I do this because I do not want to relinquish my work and voice to a room full of people who believe the money speaks a truer word than the human heart. My novel has been through several publishers now, who have all praised it yet felt unsure where it would "fit" in order to sell. When publishers love a work and say no to it on the basis of profit margins, not artistic merit, I believe it is time to question the system they work in, and to find another way. That is why I am sharing it with my readers down another, homegrown path. Writing is only complete when it finds the human beings to whom it can speak, and become part of their lives, too.

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Where will my funds go?

Quite simply, they will be used with gratitude for the printing and publishing of Shadows & Wings in both e-book format and also as actual physical books! Co-running an arts organization, I can safely say that formatting, and cover design can be done in-house, and the novel has already been extensively edited and proofed by industry professionals.

There is allowance for CD duplication, for the special EP bonus.

If, for some wonderful and hoped-for reason, our cup runneth over, then those funds will be put towards a promotion campaign and further printing runs.

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What prompted you to write Shadows & Wings?

Shadows & Wings was born many years ago, from a conversation I overheard as a child, between an aging German soldier (and relative) and my parents. But we did not know. How could we know? I was an ordinary soldier. Years later, having become obsessed, as teacher and writer, with the rise and profound effects of fascism on Germany in the 20th century, and what it means for us today, I had to try to answer that question. I had to unpack the silences in my own family, and map what was compelling me to write. 

Shadows & Wings, although about a young man coming of age as a cellist and artist in another time and place, is very much about myself. And about many people – all of us who feel like exiles, who feel that somewhere along the line we have listened and obeyed a voice that is not that of our own hearts, and we seek freedom and peace from what we have done.